Begin by looking at your monthly cable bill and multiplying it by 12. That's how much you pay for cable for a full year.

Begin by looking at your monthly cable bill and multiplying it by 12. That's how much you pay for cable for a full year.

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Are you a sports fan who can't miss your favorite teams? Unless they're regularly on ESPN, which will soon be available without a cable subscription, then stop here now. Cord cutting is not for you.

Are you a sports fan who can't miss your favorite teams? Unless they're regularly on ESPN, which will soon be available without a cable subscription, then stop here now. Cord cutting is not for you.

Photo: Houston Chronicle

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Are you a news junkie who lives with MSNBC or Fox News on all the time? Cord cutting may not be for you. If you're a CNN fan, you may be able to get by with the $20-a-month ESPN standalone package called Sling TV, which includes CNN and AMC as well. less

Are you a news junkie who lives with MSNBC or Fox News on all the time? Cord cutting may not be for you. If you're a CNN fan, you may be able to get by with the $20-a-month ESPN standalone package called Sling ... more

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Write down all the shows you and your family like to watch. Go to iTunes, Amazon Video on Demand and Google Play and check the prices for season subscriptions. Figure you'll pay a subscription fee for each series once a year, and add them up. less

Write down all the shows you and your family like to watch. Go to iTunes, Amazon Video on Demand and Google Play and check the prices for season subscriptions. Figure you'll pay a subscription fee for each ... more

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Do you currently subscribe to Netflix, Hulu or some other streaming service? Or do you plan to once you drop cable? Will you pay $15 a month for HBO Now, $20 a month for Sling TV or $50 a month for Sony's PlayStation Vue? Note the monthly and annual costs for those. less

Do you currently subscribe to Netflix, Hulu or some other streaming service? Or do you plan to once you drop cable? Will you pay $15 a month for HBO Now, $20 a month for Sling TV or $50 a month for Sony's ... more

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Do you have a smart TV with a built-in Wi-Fi connection? If not, you may need to buy a streaming TV box, such as Apple TV, a Roku or Amazon Fire TV. You'll pay up to $99 for these, but that's a one-time cost. A cheaper alternative: Google's $35 Chromecast, though it requires you to beam content from your phone, tablet or PC to your TV. There's also Amazon's $40 Fire TV Stick and Roku's $40 Streaming Stick. less

Do you have a smart TV with a built-in Wi-Fi connection? If not, you may need to buy a streaming TV box, such as Apple TV, a Roku or Amazon Fire TV. You'll pay up to $99 for these, but that's a one-time cost. ... more

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If you're bundling your Internet service with cable TV, research the cost of having standalone Internet. When you don't pair cable and Internet service, the cost usually increases. In addition, check to see if your current provider has a limit on the amount of data you can use each month. You may need to switch providers if the cap is too low. less

If you're bundling your Internet service with cable TV, research the cost of having standalone Internet. When you don't pair cable and Internet service, the cost usually increases. In addition, check to see if ... more

Photo: Associated Press

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Do you have your phone service as a bundle through your cable TV or Internet provider? Research the cost of having standalone, Internet-based, landline phone service, such as through Vonage.

Do you have your phone service as a bundle through your cable TV or Internet provider? Research the cost of having standalone, Internet-based, landline phone service, such as through Vonage.

Photo: For the Chronicle

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Add up the costs you'd pay if you dropped cable. Is it significantly less than paying your monthly cable TV bill? If so, congratulations – you're a candidate for cord cutting.

Add up the costs you'd pay if you dropped cable. Is it significantly less than paying your monthly cable TV bill? If so, congratulations – you're a candidate for cord cutting.

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2014: The year of living cable TV-free

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In April 2013, I quit being a cable customer after more than three decades of paying monthly for TV. It’s been more than 20 months since then, and 2014 marked my first full year as a cord cutter.

And I’m not alone. While the number of people who have dropped cable and rely solely on Internet streaming to watch TV shows and on-demand movies remains a very small percentage of all TV watchers, it’s steadily growing. A May 2014 report by Experian Marketing Services put the number of cord cutters at6.5 percent of TV households, up from 4.5 percent in 2010.

People drop cable TV for different reasons, but the root is almost always financial. In our case, my wife and I watch very specific shows, we aren’t interested in sports and we were only watching a handful of channels among the hundreds available in our cable package. Once our Internet connection was fast enough guarantee a reliable picture, andwe realized that paying for season subscriptions to the shows we like would save us about $1,000 a year,we canceled cable.

So after 20 months and a full calendar year, how’s it been? We have very few regrets, and at this point have no desire to go back to paying a high monthly cable TV bill. The fact that both HBO and ESPN soon will be offering standalone packages this year that don’t require a cable subscription also helps validate our decision.

Here’s how the numbers shook out in 2014:

• At the time we dropped our U-Verse TV package, we were paying about $120 a month, not including separate payments for on-demand movies. That’s $1,440 a year. Note that we had Comcast Internet (and still do), so we were paying an unbundled price for U-verse TV.

• Our Comcast Internet service costs us $65 a month – and it’s both less than we were paying at the time we cut cable and faster. One of the reasons we dropped TV service was because Comcast doubled our connection speed from 25 to 50 megabits a second. Our unbundled monthly cost was about $90, an amountI renegotiated last year. And also last year,Comcast doubled speeds yet again, bumping our connection to 100 Mbps.

• We watch our favorite TV shows through Netflix, iTunes and Amazon on Demand, with a few series occasionally viewed through my parents’ HBO Go and Showtime Anywhere accounts. (Yes, that’s not strictly kosher, but my parents don’t use those remote services, and they’re immediate family. I feel only semi-guilty.) When HBO’s standalone service launches, I’ll subscribe to that. We spent $324 for TV series through iTunes in 2014, and $124 for shows on Amazon.

• Netflix is about $100 a year. We watched some shows through Amazon Prime, which costs $99. But Prime also includes free shipping for purchases, and we buy a LOT of things from Amazon. The free shipping pays for itself, so I don’t consider Prime to be a cost for live TV (we had it before Amazon bundled video with it).

We also used Aereo, the now-defunct service that let you stream and record local channels over the Net, until it was shut down by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June. We paid $8 a month through May, or $40 total. We were paying $8 a month for Hulu, but dropped that service once we signed up for Aereo.

Here’s how the total breaks down in handy tabular form:

Service

Cost

iTunes TV shows

$324

Amazon TV shows

$124

Netflix

$100

Aereo

$40

Total for 2014

$588

That means we saved $852, or $71 each month, by not having cable TV in 2014.

Not included in this breakdown is what we paid for on-demand movies from both iTunes and Amazon. We were doing that anyway, before we dropped U-verse. The movies we would have seen on U-verse were usually available on the streaming services, so I figure that cost is a wash, and wasn’t really impacted by our dropping cable.

There were some downsides. We’re Houston Rockets fans, and would have liked to have seen some of the games that were aired on ESPN or network TV, though most games early last year were on the Comcast-only CSN. We made up for it by going to a lot of games in person!

There were a couple of times when I would have wanted to watch a news event on a cable news channel, but in most cases I was able to get the details I needed via Twitter, Facebook and news websites. (Thepending ESPN package from Dish Network includes CNN, so we may subscribe to that for $20 a month.)

But for the most part, we are very happy with our decision. Is it the right one for you? That depends on your TV watching habits, and who your Internet provider is. If you watch a lot of sports, cord-cutting likely isn’t for you. Ditto if your provider has a low data cap.

Our data usage has increased dramatically. We we started, we generally used between 35-60 GB per month. Now, it’s not unusual for us to go well over 150 GB – that’s the data cap for AT&T’s standard DSL service, and 100 GB under its 250-GB U-verse cap. (Comcast at one point had a 250-GB cap it increased to 350 GB, then suspended altogether.)

For January, we’re on pace to use 160 GB or so.

I’ve put together a slideshow that walks you through the process of deciding whether to drop cable. It’s at the top of this post. Walk through the steps and then tell us in the comments: Are you a candidate for cord cutting?